"Leah," he murmured sleepily, "why are a woman's clothes so much less fine when she takes them off? That tunic shone like silver on your body and now it looks like an old grey rag."
Leah smiled quickly with relief. She had won and he was not angry. "The body, perhaps, is not so fine without them either."
"Some day, perhaps— Listen."
Leah stiffened with terror. "What is it?"
"Rain! The drought is over."
Chapter 20
The days slowed down until they seemed bogged in the same mud that jammed the wheels of the heavy carts, which brought produce into the city. Horses and oxen strained and slipped, and cartmen, mouthing uncouth curses, got down and put their shoulders to the wheels in the sliding dirt if they wanted to deliver their wares at all. Still the rain poured and the water rushed down the kennels in increasing torrents, dragging with it the odorous filth accumulated in a three-month drought. Even the great Thames River rose, for it was raining all over England; its current became swifter, and the river gave forth a dull roar that was somehow threatening. Men shook their heads as they watched the banks slowly being swallowed day by day; the fords disappeared, large ships snapped at their anchor ropes, and small ones did not venture forth or were swept away.
The serfs, like sodden, shaggy animals, watched with hopeless eyes as their crops, thin and scraggly with drought, were beaten into the earth before they could be harvested and were completely destroyed by the rain that came too late. The cut hay was rotted by wet; the new seed drowned in the earth.
Stephen rode back to London, sullen, soaked, and dissatisfied, but convinced that Pevensey was impregnable. Most of the court returned with him, but Philip of Gloucester was not one of these. He and his men had turned slowly westward, for the end was very near and Philip wished to die near the rolling hills and deep bays of his own country.
When Cain received that last letter, the writing so uneven and the tone so wandering, he had been tempted to ride after his foster brother. He had not gone; first, because it was plain that Philip did not want him. Perhaps Philip did not wish to have anyone he loved so well see the horror of those last lingering days or weeks, perhaps he realized that he needed peace to die in, not strength to keep on living, and Cain could bring only a fruitless struggle for life.
Secondly, Cain had remained in London because, although he did not admit it, he no longer needed Philip desperately. Emotionally his wife was an even greater security to him than Philip had been, and politically his way was plainly marked out. One brief night of bitter protest had ended his struggle with the inevitable. He had wept and been comforted in Leah's arms and, as Philip himself had promised, the parting grew easier to bear when he had accepted it.
In contrast with nature, the court had put on a gaiety so febrile that it was near to hysteria. As the tension of waiting for Henry of Anjou to arrive grew greater and information no more abundant, the men around the king drowned their nerves in drink and play; the women danced and flirted and added jewels to jewels until they glittered like the star-strewn heavens. Only the pro-Angevin lords were quiet, and their lack of preparation drove the neutrals and Stephen's adherents wild, for the inaction gave no hint of what was coming. All men, however, had one thing in common. All spoke of the weather, and under the feverish activity or the quiet, above and beyond all politics, all thought of the lean year coming.
Leah lived her public life during this period as if in an unhappy dream. She took part in court functions without becoming a part of them, and when Maud approached her about filling Elizabeth Chester's place as her lady-in-waiting, she answered with pretended regret that she did not think her husband would permit it. Maud tried to explain that Leah might do as she liked with him, for Lord Radnor's infatuation was apparent to all and he made no attempt to hide it, but at court Leah continued to play the shy and timid simpleton. She merely gaped and gasped at the queen.
"Oh yes, I should like it. To stay here always where there is so much happening and you are so kind—but I would not dare ask him. Oh, madam, you ask him for me. Surely he will refuse you nothing," Leah had twittered.
Maud did not bother. If she could not bring the girl to weep and plead to remain, nothing else could move Radnor. She cast around for other ways to take Leah, willingly or by force, for there was no doubt that there lay the only method of controlling Radnor, but every faint hope was quickly destroyed. Yet the need to take Leah was desperate for as long as Radnor held hostage the men she had hired to kill him, she dared make no political move inimical to him.
If any harm came to him, or if he felt her actions to be dangerous, his father and friends would raise a scandal that could topple her husband's uneasy throne. If she could only take Leah into her power, he would do nothing—not even use the one weapon he had against her—that could endanger his wife's welfare. Maud probed for weak spots in the relationship between the Radnors and tempted Leah with this and that and spied on her daily movements, but she was constantly frustrated by the stupidity of the girl and the cleverness of the husband.
Her frustration had a good cause, because Leah seemed more dazed and frightened every day by the attentions showered on her by her husband and the queen. Soon, Maud suspected, she would be incapable of understanding any offer made to her instead of just being too timid to take advantage of it.
In addition, Leah was not alone for a moment. When she talked with the women, Radnor lounged against the wall, well within earshot and eyesight of his prize. If she left the hall, even to go to the garderobe, he went with her, waiting patiently with his back to the wall, his eyes fixed on nothing, and his hand on his sword hilt. No conversation was too interesting or important to break off if Lady Leah moved; no game so absorbing that his attention could be diverted. The house she lived in was guarded and stocked as for a siege. She did ride out sometimes to market—it rained too hard for women to ride for pleasure—but fifty or sixty hard-eyed fighters as well as her husband rode with her, each one conscious that his life was worth less than nothing, that dying would be a pleasure eagerly sought, if one hair on my lady's head were ruffled.
Lord Radnor was no happier than the queen, for his plans too hung midair, unfulfilled and unfulfillable. Pembroke and his father had, apparently, disappeared off the face of the earth. No word came from Pevensey after the siege was abandoned, and the letters Cain received from his men in Wales made it plain that Gaunt was not there.
Leah was adding considerably to his
problems, completely aside from the burden of keeping her safe. She was acting very strangely, pettish with the servants, easily annoyed, and easily moved to tears. She did a great deal of complaining. Her head ached, her back ached, she demanded, or rather asked whiningly, for almost constant attention. For some time Cain bore her petulance with patience, thinking that the aguish weather might be making her unwell, but when his temper failed and he had scolded her, she became nearly hysterical, crying out that she was afraid, so afraid. She would not say of what she was afraid, however, and he had given up questioning or scolding, his love giving him endurance.
Leah herself was almost as puzzled by her behavior as her husband. She did not know why she was so irritable and depressed. Her fears, however, were another matter entirely; they were very clear and very real. Simply, Leah was now sure she was breeding and was afraid of childbirth. She was afraid of the pain and afraid of dying. The process was no mystery to her; she had heard it discussed in detail often enough and the bitches and cats were forever bearing their young all over the castle.
Although she had never been present when one of her mother's women had delivered, she had heard the screams of the women in labor. More than one had screamed and screamed and brought forth nothing but her own death and the still blue body of a babe that never breathed. More than one also had brought forth her child successfully but then had bled and bled, the slow red drops seeping through packing and padding, dripping, dripping into a pool on the floor until the life had dripped away.
She had reconsidered her desire to tell her husband of her pregnancy as soon as she was sure of it herself. Too many women cast out lures for him at court, Joan of Shrewsbury not the least. Perhaps if he knew she was already with child, he would forget that he had promised not to look at other women; she would tell him when they were safely alone at Painscastle. Nonetheless, Leah was fiercely glad of the burden she carried because there was a vision stronger than that of a wandering husband or pain and death. Always in the worst moment of her terror it came to save her, the vision of the pride and pleasure in the faces of the women who held their hardly won children to their breasts and rejoiced.
The secret was scarcely so much of a secret as Leah thought. True she managed to be less irritable in public, but she refused to join in the rougher games, refused to join in a hunt specially organized for the ladies on a day when the downpour changed to a drizzle, and listened with a more bright-eyed interest than ever when the women spoke of child-bearing and child-rearing.
The older women who knew her exchanged pleased glances and smiled. Joan of Shrewsbury's tongue grew more venomous than ever about her and to her, for her fury was fanned to white heat by Radnor's behavior and by the look of stupid incomprehension Leah gave her whenever they came into contact. Maud tried more desperately and more deviously to woo Leah before the girl was snatched out of her reach.
The queen knew that Lord Radnor had not been informed of Leah's pregnancy because once he knew his wife was with child he would remove her to Painscastle and the safety of his well-guarded lands no matter what the political consequences. Why Leah did not tell her husband, Maud could not guess, but she did everything in her power to increase Lady Radnor's reluctance to declare her condition.
In the third week of the month of September, Cain came home from the royal hunt so plastered with mud that his wife made the menservants sluice him with pails of warm water in the courtyard before she would allow him into the house. He was irritable, his nerves keyed up because Hereford, who was still in disgrace and not invited to hunt, had taken the opportunity to slip out of town.
Hereford and Giles were riding west on the route Giles had prepared, bearing with them the prisoners of the tourney and Stephen's letters. It seemed simple; the king and queen were both with the hunt and could not be reached to give orders to stop him. Nevertheless Radnor knew that the young man was closely watched, and he had made elaborate plans for shaking the pursuers who would carry news of Hereford's route and purpose to Maud and Stephen.
Radnor hated complicated arrangements of this type which he could not personally oversee, and he hated still more the pretence of ignorance he was forced to assume, The idle talk and assumed concentration on the chase put a strain on his temper that released itself in snapping replies to Leah's questions on the day's activities. She subsided at once, sullenly helping him to remove his clothes and rub himself dry, and she spoke only to order the maids to bring up hot spiced wine to ward off a chill.
"Has there been any word?" he asked irritably for the third time.
"Only that Hereford passed the gate, which I have told you twice already," Leah snapped. "It is too soon for anything else. He will send us word when he starts in earnest, after dark."
Cain paced the room. "Hell! How I hate to wait and do nothing." To this Leah made no reply, biting her lips and trying to control herself. After some bad-natured slamming at the furniture, Cain came up behind her and stroked her hair. "You are very quiet. Does the rain make you sad? Have I made you sad?"
Leah struggled against an irrational impulse to cry, to scream. "No," she said faintly, "you never make me sad. I … Perhaps it is the constant rain which troubles me. It will be a hard year, a hard and bitter winter."
He lifted the heavy braids, coiling them around his hands. "Ay. My stewards write that things are bad at home too, though not so bad as here, for war has wasted our lands less. There will be less fighting if the people starve, but it will be needful to hunt for meat instead of pleasure, and that work is almost as hard. I must thin the animals or they too will starve, and somehow there must be meat enough to keep the serfs alive."
"Keep the serfs alive?" Leah questioned, astonished. "
You
must hunt meat for the serfs?"
Lord Radnor sighed. Always the same reaction, from men and the so-called tenderhearted women alike. Why could no one understand that serfs too had their uses? That hunger could make even those lower animals dangerous?
"Leah, if they may not hunt for themselves—a privilege I certainly will not give them because God knows what might follow from such freedom—and they have no fodder to feed their kine and no crops to exchange for fish and meat, they will die."
"What matter if they do?"
"In one way, none, really, except that if they all die, who will sow and reap crops next year?"
"Yes, but they never do
all
die."
"Well, then, think on it another way. Their ancestors swore in some manner, though not in words, to serve us, who are doubtless stronger and wiser, with their labor so that we might be free of that labor to protect them from their enemies."
"God knows you do that, my lord. You are scarred all over, my darling, with the burden of keeping the peace."
"Yes, yes, but is not hunger also an enemy? I feed and care for my horses and dogs so that they will be strong and willing to serve me. So must I regard those other dumb and helpless animals. So too do they regard me. Their little quarrels, so simple yet so impossible for them to solve, they bring to me, and when the children are hungry, they bring those also. It is, perhaps, a weakness in me, but I cannot see children cry for food. Not even the children of serfs."